Youth Speaks alumna Anna Yang is the 2022-2023 Santa Clara County Youth Poet Laureate. Yang’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cæsura 2022: RESET, The New York Times, The Stanford Daily, KQED, The Journals of Justice, among others. Her writing has received multiple accolades, including awards from Scholastic Art & Writing, the National Council of Teachers of English, and Foyle Young Poets. Yang received honorable mention for the inaugural Amanda Gorman Future Voices Poetry Prize. She resides in California’s Bay Area.
Even at midnight, 爷爷 warns me about capitalists as he drops bills into a can for fried stinky tofu. His breath clatters down streets, protecting red lanterns and portraits of Mao, murmuring disapprovals for the city he stands in.